An arrangement of the nature of the present disclosure is found in U.S. Pat. No. 5,546,705, which is hereby expressly incorporated herein by reference for purposes of disclosure as part of the present written description.
Vehicular mountable cargo containers, of the variety commonly referred to as cargo boxes, are well known. As in the instant depicted in U.S. Pat. No. 5,546,705, one type of such a carrier is roof mounted, and among those, there is a particular type that the present applicant refers to as being a Dual Sided Opening cargo box.
As described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,546,705, a dual-force strut (or struts) can be used between the two halves of the container that provide a opening spring force when in a range of motion approaching the open configuration and an opposite direction closing spring force when in a range of motion approaching the closed configuration. A distinct transition regarding the direction of the force (from urged extension to urged retraction) occurs therebetween. In the instance of the strut's closing force, that, together with the weight of the top can, instead of assisting the operator, cause the top to undesirably slam shut.
In another aspect, when two struts are used, one at each end of the cargo box as shown in U.S. Pat. No. 5,546,705, the relatively strong forces imposed by the struts can result in the two ends of the box both opening and closing in an imbalanced manner (one gets ahead of the other in the direction that is being urged by the operator, or the two struts apply different direction urgings with respect to each other at the same time; that is, one strut is urging closure while the other strut is urging opening. This detrimentally results in a twisting or torquing of the usually semi-flexible box-top which presents as misbehavior or mal-performance of the product to the operator.